Which do you think is the bigger risk to ordinary users?
- someone hacks into Microsoft and accesses their files from onedrive (for passwords/blackmail-info I guess?)
- Microsoft looks at their files in onedrive and does something bad (not sure what)
- someone hacks into their computer and accesses their files. Or someone does so by causing the user to download something bad
- the user’s ssd fails or is corrupted because they have consumer grade hardware that is not treated particularly well, taking all their documents with it.
- the user accidentally deletes some important document (or eg drag-and-drops the contents of their document somewhere else and autosaves the now blank document, or they lose it some other way)
I think the benefits outweigh the risks for a lot of users for this change. I don’t know how onedrive works but one could imagine it working in a reasonably secure way by encrypting data at rest (secure keys on device would be nice but bad UX; key-derivation function probably better). IMO the real problem with the feature is typical big-company lack of coordination (the amount of free storage isn’t enough for how much people typically need, even right away) and lack of incentives to fix it (the increase in paying customers is probably worth a lot more to whoever caused this change than the increase in annoyed users due to drive-full warnings) and the idea that that people might pay Microsoft for more storage (that you can’t easily pay for remote reliable automatic backup storage when you set the OS up does not feel like a particularly big advantage of free software to me).
I think there are things not to like about this but it doesn’t seem to me to be the obviously terrible thing your comment suggests. Certainly it seems less bad than lots of other recent windows changes.
There's no justification here for turning the feature on for users who have already explicitly chosen not to use it, or for not presenting them with the choice.
I mean, the person who caused windows to behave this way surely had some justification, even if it was self-serving. I think a choice would be better but I also think that being on is a reasonable default for users.
I don’t understand the point about users explicitly opting out (and that being switched?). I would chalk such a thing down to the kind of big company systematic nefariousness you get (no one needs to say ‘make it ignore the opt out’, they just implement a default wrong and don’t notice/fix/investigate the bug because KPIs increase)
Having external backups set up correctly is pretty good for users, and I think that would justify trying to make it more of a default. This seems pretty obvious to me, but I expect if Microsoft did surveys they would find people complaining about how terrible losing a document or disk was for them in the past. I don’t know what ‘explicitly chosen not to use it’ means, but I think you or I would probably consider such an action to be more deliberate than the average user doing that (guess: trying to get rid of notification or reduce steps in install or just randomly clicking through screens is reasonably likely).
> I don’t know what ‘explicitly chosen not to use it’ means
This is the giveaway that you aren't saying anything in good faith.
> but I think you or I would probably consider such an action to be more deliberate than the average user doing that
Nice appeal to our superiority or whatever you want to call it, but this is irrelevant. The "average user" is no less deserving of the choice and naturally it's up to them to make the right one for them, not Microsoft.
Your whole argument is just diminishing the value of peoples consent.
I thought I must have been missing something so I reread the OP, but I still don’t get where one ‘explicitly choos[es] not to use it’?
For a new computer I think it looks something like:
1. Set up with your Microsoft account which you may need to create
2. Now, if you were already using onedrive, your files are synced from the internet. If you weren’t then the default contents (ie empty/trivial) are being synced.
I don’t really see that as the user making any explicit choice not to use onedrive and the default doesn’t seem very bad. It doesn’t feel terribly different from other defaults like windows defender or scanning for nearby WiFi networks.
But maybe there are alternatives that do feel more like the user making an explicit choice which the OS overriding that? Eg if you upgrade an existing installation or go through some ‘transfer from other computer’ process so that the directories being synced aren’t trivial. The OP didn’t mention such scenarios so I’m reading between the lines/guessing here.
Do you have some scenario where the user clicks some ‘don’t use onedrive’ button and has their choice overridden?
<< Microsoft looks at their files in onedrive and does something bad (not sure what)
Some of us use documents that should not just end up 'in the cloud' for various reasons including legal, regulatory or just 'I don't want Redmont to have copies of my kids pictures'. It does not even have to be that they do something bad to it. It is merely that the act of taking it without user permission is a major violation of trust.
I definitely see why businesses might be hesitant about such a feature (obviously they could also read whatever onedrive-related contract they have with Microsoft and make an informed decision). I mostly think users don’t really think of this as some stark distinction, though perhaps they should. I still think the real risk of expensive (in the general sense) data loss is worse for users than the cost of this kind of ‘major violation of trust’.
What you say is true. And what you say completely misses the point.
The problem isn't that cloud sync/backup is (or isn't) useful. It's that Microsoft isn't respecting users' agency to adopt it or not. If the product is indeed useful on its merits, then there's no need to turn it on by default or continually nag users who say "no thanks." And it's not like Microsoft doesn't have a history of underhanded moves to capture users into its ecosystem; see what happens when you search for Chrome or Firefox in Edge https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...
I think this particular change is less ‘evil’ than lots of the recent ‘evil’ Microsoft things, so I’m not very convinced by comparing it to bad Microsoft behaviour.
I think the big advantage of backups is that they’ll have been on for ages by the time you need them. That is, their main failure modes are:
- not backing things up because of some misconfiguration
- not backing things up because of running out of money/quota/having a card on file expire
- not having been set up
- deleting files you later want to retrieve
I think it’s actually somewhat hard to protect users from cases 2 and 3 without also ‘nagging’ other users. Causing a user to set things up could be a lot better for them than not setting it up because they quickly clicked through some screen during installation. There is some balance to be had and I think that as tech-savvy / high-literacy users, we should expect to feel like it is more on the nagging end of the scale than we would like.
I don't make that distinction myself. It all falls into the bucket of "Microsoft doesn't respect user agency." Their design decisions are a direct reflection of their (broken) values, full stop.
Let's say I don't care about privacy. Still left with a software that does what I don't want it to do without asking me, and making it hard to reverse it. It's a software I paid my money for, not some kind of evil "free" product.
And why do I need Candy Crush on my computer? Who knows better than me what I want my machine to do?
I think the bigger risk to people comes not from the consequences of actions like this but from this attitude. Who is in the center? Who has the freedom? The same goes for countries as well.
I’m not totally sure what the point you’re making is? I don’t love the thing where OEMs are paid to sell computers with a bunch of extra crap like candy crush installed.
Is the complaint just that windows comes with a feature you don’t want? (Does this all come from being strongly pushed towards / requiring having a non-local account?) I think that’s a reasonable opinion to hold but it feels somewhat different from disliking candy crush being installed.
Perhaps I’m too stupid to be able to think about the abstract power-balance consequences of turning on onedrive by default, or of similar things.
- someone hacks into Microsoft and accesses their files from onedrive (for passwords/blackmail-info I guess?)
- Microsoft looks at their files in onedrive and does something bad (not sure what)
- someone hacks into their computer and accesses their files. Or someone does so by causing the user to download something bad
- the user’s ssd fails or is corrupted because they have consumer grade hardware that is not treated particularly well, taking all their documents with it.
- the user accidentally deletes some important document (or eg drag-and-drops the contents of their document somewhere else and autosaves the now blank document, or they lose it some other way)
I think the benefits outweigh the risks for a lot of users for this change. I don’t know how onedrive works but one could imagine it working in a reasonably secure way by encrypting data at rest (secure keys on device would be nice but bad UX; key-derivation function probably better). IMO the real problem with the feature is typical big-company lack of coordination (the amount of free storage isn’t enough for how much people typically need, even right away) and lack of incentives to fix it (the increase in paying customers is probably worth a lot more to whoever caused this change than the increase in annoyed users due to drive-full warnings) and the idea that that people might pay Microsoft for more storage (that you can’t easily pay for remote reliable automatic backup storage when you set the OS up does not feel like a particularly big advantage of free software to me).
I think there are things not to like about this but it doesn’t seem to me to be the obviously terrible thing your comment suggests. Certainly it seems less bad than lots of other recent windows changes.